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Ashley Madison Says Gizmodo Report that Women Don't Really Use the Site Is Wrong

Nearly 90,000 women signed up last week, the company says.

After a massive hack, the dumping of its digital innards, and the resignation of its CEO, Avid Life Media (ALM), the company that owns extramarital affairs site Ashley Madison, wants you to think it is still going strong.

"Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated," the company said in a statement Monday.

Last week, Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz wrote that almost none of the women on the site actually used it and the site was a deliberate scam. "Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren't there," she wrote.

Avid Life Media is refuting those claims.

"A reporter who claimed to analyze the stolen data made incorrect assumptions about the meaning of fields contained in the leaked data," the statement continued. "This reporter concluded that the number of active female members on Ashley Madison could be calculated based on those assumptions. That conclusion was wrong."

Over the past week, "hundreds of thousands" of new users joined, "including 87,595 women," the company said. "Last week alone, women sent more than 2.8 million messages within our platform."